How Mega Millions and Powerball Make You a Loser

Nobody won last Friday’s Mega Millions lottery, so this week’s grand prize has grown to $1.6 billion dollars. That’s Billion, with a “B.” On Saturday, nobody won the Powerball lottery, so this week’s prize will be $620 million. These events are hardly surprising since both of these multi-state, government-sponsored gambling cartels recently tweaked the odds to produce such results.

Since the Mega Millions formula change, players now pick five numbers from 1 to 70 and a Mega number of 1 to 25. The odds of winning the jackpot are 1 in 302,575,350. The odds of winning the Powerball lottery are currently 1 in 292,201,338. The odds of being killed by a falling vending machine: 1 in 12,000,000.

Why did the lotteries ramp up the odds? If more people lose, the lottery prizes grow larger. When prizes grow, more people buy lottery tickets. When prizes are “only” $100 million, many lottery ticket buyers are the poor and desperate, but when prizes are huge, even wealthy people buy lottery tickets.When more people buy lottery tickets, the bigger the corporate profits for Mega Millions and Powerball. But selling more lottery tickets increases state school district budgets, right?

No. education budgets stay about the same. States merely use lottery profits to replace funding they previously got from other sources.

More:

“How Much Do Americans Spend on the Lottery?” Mike Brown, lendedu

“Per capita lottery spending has doubled since 1995,” Christopher Ingraham, Washington Post

“Why all lotteries are based on a lie,” Allison Schrager, Quartz

“Powerball Windfall? Schools Don’t Always Benefit From Lottery Sales,” Elizabeth Chuck, NBC News

“How ’80s excess fueled today’s Mega Millions mania,” Jonathan D. Cohen, Washington Post

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When I Win The Lottery

“When I Win The Lottery,” by Camper Van Beethoven.

When I win the lottery
Gonna buy all the girls on my block
A color TV and a bottle of French perfume
When I win the lottery
Gonna donate half my money to the city
So they have to name a street or a school or a park after me
When I win the lottery

Full lyrics here.

CVB website

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Next Big Winner

“Next Big Winner, by the Homegrown Band.

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Americans Sell Off Stocks, Buy Lottery Tickets

It’s 2016. Wall Street is down, but lottery ticket sales are up. Wednesday’s Powerball grand prize is expected to be around $1.5 billion.

Powerball includes 44 state lotteries and those in DC, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Odds of winning: 1 in 292 million.

The Tax On People Who Are Bad at Math

Ambrose Bierce defined the lottery as “a tax on people who are bad at math,” but it’s really a tax on the dreams of the poor.

Last year Americans spent $70 billion on state-sponsored lottery tickets, more than on books, video games, movies and sporting events combined. The poorest third of households buy half of all lottery tickets, and state lotteries advertise most aggressively in poor neighborhoods, as Derek Thompson points out in The Atlantic.

Why do the poor play the lottery?

“It’s not that poor people don’t understand that the lottery has a near-zero chance of making them dynastically wealthy. It’s that they think everything else has an actually-zero chance. ….  State lotteries, in other words, don’t just prey on poor people’s dreams—they do that for everyone—but rather on desperate dreams.”

— “Why you should never, ever play the lottery,” Matt O’Brien, Washington Post

The NBA Wants Gambling. What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

National Basketball Association Commissioner Adam Silver wants betting on professional sports legalized in places other than Las Vegas, and wrote a New York Times op-ed about it. After all, why should the crooks get all that sports book money, $400 billion a year? Besides, nothing could go wrong, except maybe a bit of point shaving and a few dirty referee calls.

So will it happen? Don’t bet on it. It would take an act of Congress, a repeal of the 1992 Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act. And with this do-nothing Congress, odds are surely against it.

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John Oliver Plays (With) the Lottery

Americans spent $68 billion playing the lottery last year, more than they spent on movie tickets, music, professional sports, video games and porn combined.. You can think of state lotteries as a tax on the dreams of the poor, since the poor spend more on these state-sponsored gambling schemes than more well-off people. Lottery ads sell hope, but the odds of winning are hopeless (1 in 176 million).

States sold the lottery concept to voters by saying the money earned would go to good causes like education, but it doesn’t, it merely displaces existing funding instead of supplementing it, so school budgets are flat or reduced.

Lottery winners are notoriously bad with their money. Hey, if they were good with money, would they play the freakin’ lottery in the first place?

John Oliver recently analyzed the lottery on his television program:

Playing the Lottery

“To grasp how unlikely it was for Gloria C. MacKenzie, an 84-year-old Florida widow, to have won the $590 million Powerball lottery in May, Robert Williams, a professor of health sciences at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, offers this scenario: head down to your local convenience store, slap $2 on the counter, and fill out a six-numbered Powerball ticket. It will take you about 10 seconds. To get your chance of winning down to a coin toss, or 50 percent, you will need to spend 12 hours a day, every day, filling out tickets for the next 55 years. It’s going be expensive. You will have to plunk down your $2 at least 86 million times.“

More:

“Why We Keep Playing the Lottery,” Adam Piore, Nautilus

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Low-Power Powerball

“Powerball at an estimated $600 million as jackpot continues to grow,” AP via Fox News

“Got THE ticket for tonight’s big Powerball drawing?,” CNN

Odds of winning: 1 in 175.2 million.

Odds of becoming president: 1 in 43,000,000.

Odds of being struck by lightning this year: 1 in 700,000.

The lottery is a tax on people who are bad at math, according to Ambrose Bierce, but it’s worse than that. It’s a tax on the hopes and dreams of the poor. The only way lottery corporations get away with it is by giving a kickback to state governments, a small cut of their vast profits.

UPDATE:

“$590M-plus Powerball: 1 winning ticket sold in Florida,” Barbara Rodriguez, AP via Boston Globe

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Question 7: Maryland Gambling Proxy War

Maryland voters go to the polls today to decide if they will be manipulated by West Virginia casino owners or Las Vegas casino owners. ‘Vegas wants to run gambling joints in Prince Georges County, near Washington DC. Maryland backers claim this will keep the money they lose inside their own state, as if it won’t just go to Nevada to be reinvested in Macau or a Mitt Romney PAC or something. West Virginia casino owners want to avoid competition from fancier gambling dens closer to Baltimore and DC, so they’re against it. The only sure winners here: advertising agencies and local broadcasters, since both sides spent millions bombarding helpless residents with commercials.

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